Varied Types eBook

Instances of this would not be difficult to find.
But the tests of poetry are those instances in which
this outrageous scientific phraseology becomes natural
and unconscious. Tennyson wrote one of his own
exquisite lyrics describing the exultation of a lover
on the evening before his bridal day. This would
be an occasion, if ever there was one, for falling
back on those ancient and assured falsehoods of the
domed heaven and the flat earth in which generations
of poets have made us feel at home. We can imagine
the poet in such a lyric saluting the setting sun
and prophesying the sun’s resurrection.
There is something extraordinarily typical of Tennyson’s
scientific faith in the fact that this, one of the
most sentimental and elemental of his poems, opens
with the two lines:

Rivers had often been commanded to flow by poets,
and flowers to blossom in their season, and both were
doubtless grateful for the permission. But the
terrestrial globe of science has only twice, so far
as we know, been encouraged in poetry to continue
its course, one instance being that of this poem,
and the other the incomparable “Address to the
Terrestrial Globe” in the “Bab Ballads.”

There was, again, another poetic element entirely
peculiar to Tennyson, which his critics have, in many
cases, ridiculously confused with a fault. This
was the fact that Tennyson stood alone among modern
poets in the attempt to give a poetic character to
the conception of Liberal Conservatism, of splendid
compromise. The carping critics who have abused
Tennyson for this do not see that it was far more daring
and original for a poet to defend conventionality
than to defend a cart-load of revolutions. His
really sound and essential conception of Liberty,

“Turning to scorn with lips divine
The falsehood of extremes,”

is as good a definition of Liberalism as has been
uttered in poetry in the Liberal century. Moderation
is not a compromise; moderation is a passion;
the passion of great judges. That Tennyson felt
that lyrical enthusiasm could be devoted to established
customs, to indefensible and ineradicable national
constitutions, to the dignity of time and the empire
of unutterable common sense, all this did not make
him a tamer poet, but an infinitely more original
one. Any poetaster can describe a thunderstorm;
it requires a poet to describe the ancient and quiet
sky.

I cannot, indeed, fall in with Mr. Morton Luce in
his somewhat frigid and patrician theory of poetry.
“Dialect,” he says, “mostly falls
below the dignity of art.” I cannot feel
myself that art has any dignity higher than the indwelling
and divine dignity of human nature. Great poets
like Burns were far more undignified when they clothed
their thoughts in what Mr. Morton Luce calls “the
seemly raiment of cultured speech” than when
they clothed them in the headlong and flexible patois
in which they thought and prayed and quarrelled and
made love. If Tennyson failed (which I do not
admit) in such poems as “The Northern Farmer,”
it was not because he used too much of the spirit of
the dialect, but because he used too little.